[White-water] Broached canoe on Mill City to Mehama

[Mark Scantlebury]

The broached canoe is still stuck on Coffin Rock. Here's how one canoeist with the Lower Columbia Canoe Club who paddled that section this past Saturday described the hazard:

We looked at the "Wreck of Coffin Rock" up close today.  The boat is broached facing upstream, so that the two ends are open to the current and below the surface on each side of the Rock.  The broken-back center actually rises like a pyramid upstream and on top of Coffin Rock.  The top surface of the Rock is getting to be very dry with moss growing straight up.   It doesn't appear from upstream to represent a major hazard, but that is deceptive. The sunken ends of the boat narrow the right and left channels around the Rock at the water line, and then extend another three  feet under water.  Yes, it may be possible to run a boat over the submerged ends, but they have gunnels to catch an errant swimmer or a badly angled boat and there are ropes running downstream from the boat that can tangle a swimmer.

There is a S-shaped channel around the left edge of the ledge, but it looked too tight for a tandem boat. We could have tried running the left of the rock or the left channel on the edge of the island, but both looked sufficiently uncertain that we chose to land high and dry on the left ledge and study the situation from the top of the ledge.

The bottom line is that paddlers should avoid this channel all together until the waters rise enough to flush out the boat.  This is best done by directing all boats to the left channel of the river immediately after the bend below N. Santiam Park (the park with the long boney ledge).  This is the route most drift boaters and rafts take already.  It meets the rest of the river left of the island next to Coffin Rock and avoids Coffin Rock.
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